Tales from the Service: The Interrupted Retirement

2948-05-12 - Tales from the Service: The Interrupted Retirement

Blinking her eyes in the stinging sunlight, Elaine Ziskind stepped out onto the rear deck of her hydroskimmer as it rocked back and forth in the gentle surf. The only sound besides the crump and hiss of surf was the keening cries of rockdivers circling above the cliffs and crowding the water-sculpted outcrops among which the watercraft sat at anchor.

As her eyes adjusted to the harsh blue-white light of the local star, Elaine gawked at the stunning scenery which dusk arrival had hidden from her the previous day. The sheltered cove looked simply too vivid to be real – the green surf crashing on red-brown rocks, lemon-yellow grasses marching down narrow black sand beaches in dozens of sheer canyons. Over everything, the infinte bowl of a turquoise sky devoid of clouds offered no veil to hide the graceful crescent of the planet’s huge moon.

“It’s prettier than anywhere else we’ve gone on the job, isn’t it?” Firmino Bellini hopped down from the roof of the cabin, where he’d been lounging. Firmi, an early riser by nature no matter where he went, had probably watched sunrise over the rim of a cup of synthetic coffee.

He didn’t need to tell Elaine how beautiful and peaceful the first part of the day had been – his serenely smug expression said enough. She tossed her head and pointed at a, boxy silhouette at the top of one of the cliffs. “That’s it, then?” It was the only sign of human presence in view, except for the hydroskimmer itself. “I was expecting…”

“Bigger?” Firmi walked up beside her and handed over a maglens, which she held up to her eye. The structure on the hill, composed of local stones held together into four stout walls with off-white plaster, wasn’t much bigger than the cramped cabin of the skimmer itself.

“Comfortable.” Elaine increased magnification and saw that the gray-blue door and window-shutters were  obviously polymer objects spun by a fabricator. Perhaps the place was not as primitive as it was obviously meant to look. “Any movement?”

Firmi shook his head. “If he’s there, he knows we’re here, but nothing has moved up there since sunrise.”

“Let’s get this over with.” Elaine tossed the maglens back and headed for the bow, where a hoversled lay lashed to the deck. After so many months in space, she ached to spend a few hours enjoying the scenery and sunlight, but with a war on and the company on contract, leisure wouldn’t pay.

Firmi disappeared into the cabin to remove their heavy weapons from the crates. They had hoped their distasteful task could be accomplished without shooting, but no mercenary ever bet their life on things going to plan. If the occupant of the cabin on the clifftop proved uncooperative, Elaine wasn’t about to let politeness dig her an unmarked grave.

Elaine had finished untying the cables holding the hoversled in place and installing its microreactor when Firmi returned and dropped a heavy crate into the latch-point on the rear of the sled. She looked up from its control column only long enough to take her carbine from his hands and sling it over her shoulder, then returned to watching over the sled’s start-up diagnostics.

Once the sled’s power-up cycle completed, Elaine eased it a few inches off the hydroskimmer’s deck on manual control, then slipped to one side to get clear of the watercraft’s antenna masts and protruding cabin in case of sudden swells. Firmi waited on the fantail until Elaine brought the sled around to pick him up, his heavy bolt rifle and its powerpack hanging conspicuously from his broad shoulders, and his light-duty combat armor hidden imperfectly under his uniform.

As the sled carried the pair toward the crashing surf in one of the canyons of the shore, Elaine noticed that her partner’s eyes were on the circling rockdivers high above, their golden-brown wings outstretched to catch late-morning updrafts. She didn’t blame him for being enchanted with the scenery, but there was a job to do. “Mind the op, not the birds.”

“Yeah, yeah.” His polarized lenses flashed as he turned his attention forward. “Sort of seems unfair, you know? Kirke-Moore went through all the trouble of finding a place like this, and we’re-”

“We’re doing our part.” Elaine interrupted. “Hang on.”

As she eased the hovering craft up to the loose slope of a damp rockslide, Elaine kicked in the sled’s A-grav thrusters at full power. With a distressed whine, the vehicle bounded up the slope in several elastic leaps, skidding in all directions as she wrestled with the controls to keep it level. The coast being sheer cliffs and high-walled coves for many kilometers, the sled was hardly the ideal vehicle to approach Kirke-Moore’s cabin, but it was the only way available to make the ascent short of cable and pitons. An airborne approach would have been preferred, except that the world’s tiny population had few aircraft, none of which were available for rental by heavily armed mercenary visitors. Instead, they had made the three-day journey from spaceport to the beautiful cove by the only vehicle available to them – the hydroskimmer.

When Elaine wrestled the sled onto the lip of the ravine, she caught her breath. Inland from the cliffs, rolling meadows of glittering crystalline flora marched to the far horizon, broken only by tufts of the same vivid yellow grass which dominated the cliff-edge. Shaking her head, she pulled the craft in a wide arc around the seaside cabin while Firmi watched for signs of movement. They had not come to harm Bozsi Kirke-Moore, but with all the trouble he’d taken to disappear, he would certainly not be pleased to see them.

With no sign of movement, Elaine brought the sled down in a clearing a few hundred meters away. As soon as it touched down, Firmi leapt off and vanished into the chest-high crystalline scrub, his size not hindering him in the slightest when it came to stealth and speed. Elaine stayed aboard only long enough to put it into safe idle mode, then stepped off herself, heading straight for the cabin.

“I’m in position.” Fermi’s voice, low and grim, filtered in through Elaine’s comm earpiece as she pushed her way through a stand of sturdy emerald-green bushes that seemed more mineral than vegetable. “Still no movement.”

“Copy.” She didn’t want to say more – the swaying rock-crystal garden of the local biosphere under the hard light of the local star seemed almost too peaceful for human speech, even though she was only fifty meters from Kirke-Moore’s front door.

At last, she pushed her way into the cleared area around the cliff-side cottage, where the yellow grass, regularly cut back, stood only ankle-high. The structure’s shuttered windows offered no hint that anyone waited within. Squaring her shoulders, Elaine circled the house and stood in front of the door, knowing that Firmi’s bolt-rifle was aimed precisely over her shoulder. Taking a deep breath and a single glance down at the stunning cove and the tiny-looking hydroskimmer anchored there, she knocked.

“It’s come to this, has it?”

The softly hoarse voice, barely audible over the hiss of the wind in the grass, took Elaine by surprise. She whirled to see a thin, white-haired man lying on a mat in the grass by the side of the house, head propped up on a rock. Though age had weathered the features that once most of the mercenaries and lawmen in the Reach had known well, Bozsi Kirke-Moore was still an unmistakable figure.

Though the old deep-space pirate’s only visible weapon, a chemical-propellant hunting rifle, sat idly against a nearby rock, his nonchalance and choice of sunning-spot set off alarm bells in Elaine’s head. Though visible from where she stood, and easily able to observe the hydroskimmer, he was entirely out of Firmi’s line of fire, demonstrating that he knew precisely where the big mercenary had stationed himself.

Firmi, listening in at a distance and watching Elaine in his bolt rifle’s scope, realized where their mark was as well. “Damn. I don’t have a shot, Elaine. Watch yourself.”

“Come now, mercenary. What brings you to my humble retirement home on such a fine day?” Kirke-Moore rolled his shoulders and sat more fully upright, leaning back against the rough wall of the cottage.

Elaine swallowed, deliberately keeping her hands away from the carbine slung at her back. Even in his advanced age, the most notorious pirate of the previous century was certainly faster on the draw than she was. “I’m under orders to escort you to Maribel, sir.”

“That really is a shame. I will not be going to Maribel.”

“Our employer thought you might say that, sir.” Elaine stepped away from the door and toward Kirke-Moore. “He gave me something to give you.” She motioned to a pocket of her jumpsuit, knowing not to reach for any concealed items without his leave.

The man nodded, and Elaine slowly reached into her pocket and withdrew the token Admiral Zahariev had given her. She tossed it across the intervening three meters. Kirke-Moore’s thin, heavily-veined hand snatched it out of the air, and he held it up to the sun. The dark metal of the half-moon shape seemed to darken the day’s brilliant sunlight, as if drawing the whole of the local primary’s radiance into itself.

“Supposing I handed this back, and said that I was still not going to Maribel.” Kirke-Moore said at length, his voice soft and his words deliberately slow. “What does your contract instruct you to do?”

Elaine hesitated. “Your… Remains are to be returned to Maribel in that event, sir.”

The old pirate chuckled, as if daring her to try. “And Reneer only sent the two of you to do the job? That’s almost insulting.”

Elaine said nothing. Firmi had packed enough heavy weapons to level the cottage from a distance if he holed up inside, but she doubted that would come as a surprise, just as the presence of her partner in overwatch had not escaped his notice.

Evidently, no answer proved to be the correct one. “Very well, mercenary. I have always honored my debts.” Kirke-Moore pocketed Admiral Zahariev’s token and stood. “I have only one condition.”

Elaine could hear Firmi’s sigh of relief over the comms. Kirke-Moore was taller than she expected, standing head and shoulders over her. “And that is?”

The old pirate smiled, his notoriously uneven teeth flashing against his sun-bronzed face. “For the rest of this day, I am still retired. It’s too perfect to spoil, don’t you agree?”

Elaine couldn’t help but nod her agreement, her gaze wandering once again to the bright, sparkling water of the cove below.

For the younger members of this audience, the name of Boszi Kirke-Moore may not inspire the same dread that it does for the older members of the interstellar community. Kirke-Moore was perhaps the most effective and terrifying pirate of ever to prowl the Coreward Frontier. Almost twenty years ago, his name was nearly a curse in this region. That he retired peacefully to a garden world is a quirk of fate which has much to do with that reputation - and for the long list of Navy captains who lost their lives and ships chasing him. When he'd had his fill of piracy, Kirke-Moore simply picked a planet to retire on, parked his ship Samarkand empty in orbit, and took a shuttle down to the pleasant spot of his choosing. His violent reputation ensured few visitors, and a strict set of security protocols on all space travel facilities on the planet has discouraged him from coming out of retirement voluntarily after the Navy towed away Samarkand.

One of the many Navy captains who pursued Kirke-Moore through the last years of his career of crimes and outrages was Reneer Zahariev - the very same who now commands Fifth Fleet. Kirke-Moore's oddly amicable retirement has always been rumored to have been arranged with the Navy, and Kirke-Moore's appearance at Fifth Fleet headquarters recently has for many confirmed these decades-old suspicions.

Kirke-Moore showing up to advise the same lawmen who he once evaded or murdered has been a public relations spectacle for the fleet - and Naval Intelligence has allowed the mercenaries Admiral Zahariev sent to retrieve him to describe the situation in which they found this old pirate enjoying his retirement.

Details

Tales from the Service: On Horus’s Heels

2948-05-05 – Tales from the Service: On Horus’s Heels  

When last we checked in with the Maribelan agents chasing Incarnation agents on that world several weeks ago (Tales from the Service: Ladeonist Roundup) they were breasting a stream of local counterhuman youths sympathetic to the Incarnation’s cause. In a follow-up story which was sent in only two weeks after that story appeared on this feed, we find the agents have closed in on their prey – but the terrorist they are chasing, who is to my knowledge still on the loose, has plenty of obstacles to throw into their path. 

Note that Mr. Vieth’s rather hard-hearted view of the youth Ladeonist elements on Maribel (who also exist on other worlds in the Frontier, to be sure) are his own, not those of this media company. Given what he goes through in his pursuit of this terrorist, we should give him a good deal of latitude with the dim and irredeemable picture he paints of the misguided youths providing comfort to this enemy agent. 

[N.T.B. - Counterhuman bastards, the lot of them. Agent Vieth, shoot to kill, and if any of the pathetic excuses for parents that raised those fools ever make a stink, you let me know, and I’ll make sure you get some proper muscle in your corner. This is war, and anyone who helps terrorists deserves everything they get. 

Before allowing me to insert this note into the feed item, Duncan insisted that I remind you lot that this is my opinion, not the view of Cosmic Background Media Group.] 

“What do you think he was up to in here?” Yejide Blum, toying nervously with the counter-nanotech emitter on her wrist, picked her way through the clutter inside the old warehouse, brushing away trailing streamers of cobweb-moss drooping from the corroded rafters high above. 

“Probably a dead drop, maybe a place to rest for a few hours.” Tal Vieth stopped his own forward progress to scrutinize the dilapidated structural elements around him. The warehouse was not entirely abandoned, but its poor condition and dust-cloaked contents suggested that whoever owned it had long forgotten this small storage outbuilding among the tangle of spaceport storage facilities on Maribel. Such a neglected space presented a perfect site for the local Ladeonist radicals to leave supplies for their ideological ally, without much risk to themselves – according to what they’d learned from interrogating their last batch of such worthless counterhumans, their prey had been in the warehouse only that morning. 

Tal and his team had been pursuing the Incarnation agent known as Horus for weeks, rounding up broader and broader batches of the city’s counterhuman underground in the process. Horus, a technologically defiled specimen beyond anything the local chip-heads could dream of, had damaged Maribelan infrastructure in dozens of petty ways, and was behind the deaths of at least eleven locals and three Navy officers on shore leave. On most worlds in the Reach, such minor impact for such an elite agent would be considered a success, but with the coming of the Confederated Fifth Fleet and many supply depots to support it, any Incarnation activity at Maribel warranted a disproportionate response. 

“It’s a wonder he cleans them out.” Yejide stopped to scrutinize a stack of crates rising out of the general tumbledown mess on the warehouse floor. She ran a quick scan for tagger nanites, then continued on her way. “I don’t know what’s worse, the food they give him, or the literature.” 

“Definitely the literature.” Tal, having only recently broken a trembling young dilettante’s resistance to interrogation by reading back to her the gushing fan letter she’d left in a dead drop and threatening to give it to the local HyperCast news agencies, shook his head. Other sympathizers left fiction of their own writing, of dubious quality and for no conceivable purpose. “He could steal everything he needs without any trouble. The dead drops are for them, not for him.” He knew only too well how quickly stories of the interactions between the counterhuman youths traveled across the Reach, each story-teller embellishing their role in a pathetic search for meaning and fame. It was true that the home-brewed revolutionaries gave the terrorist legitimate assistance, but they generally did so in a sacrificial way, with scores of their numbers already languishing in high-security holding cells in orbit, under Navy guard. 

The orbital confinement under Navy guard was of course a critical detail. Many of the youths had prominent and influential relatives who believed the round-ups to be illegitimate or arbitrary, and who were even at that instant fighting for their release. Even presented with the evidence, some parents refused to believe that their children had voluntarily aided the murderous agents of a foreign power. They believed their hapless spawn to be harmless, as if inability to cause any real harm absolved them of the attempt. 

Yejide hopped over a tarpaulin-covered mound of junk. “For their crimes against the written language alone, we should-” 

Tal looked up from the debris he’d been scrutinizing to see that his deputy had vanished. “Yejide?” He was halfway toward where she had last stood in an instant, vaulting over a pair of trellis struts balanced against a large crate. 

He spotted his downed associate almost immediately. There was no sign of blood or a wound, but she lay spralwed on the filthy floor where she’d fallen, eyes open and unseeing. Reaching for his wrist computer, he turned on his short-range comm to alert the other half dozen officers standing outside. “Officer down. Get a medevac in here now.” 

The only response was the soft tone of the comm’s inability to connect. Tal’s sidearm was in his hand the moment he heard it. Horus had never jammed law enforcement bands before, but jammer-harassment of constabulatory personnel was a common tactic used by Ladeonists and the criminal underground. It might be several minutes before those outside noticed. 

“Hello, Agent Vieth.” The smooth voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. “Your persistence is quite remarkable.” 

“Hello, Agent Horus.” Tal turned a slow circle, staying close to his downed companion. “Didn’t think you’d still be here.” 

“And you usually spend many more hours terrorizing the children you round up. Was there something wrong with the last batch?” 

Tal suppressed the urge to retort that the youthful counterhumans he’d picked up in Horus’s trail were fully legal adults. The barb stung because he felt the same way – the would-be revolutionaries, whatever their age, were intellectual children, play-acting as freedom fighters. “They gave you up quicker than the last set. You’re running out of true believers.” 

The Incarnation agent laughed, and Tal, suppressing a shudder, thought he heard servos whirring within the sound. “Do you really think that?” 

Before Tal could reply, he spied movement on a raised catwalk at the far side of the warehouse. Three scrawny figures walked boldly into view, each pointing a bulbous pistol-like object in Tal’s direction. They were grinning, but their postures told him they were terrified and unfamiliar with their weapons. 

“It was nice talking to you, Agent Vieth.” Horus’s voice seemed to whirl around Tal in a mockery of his best attempt to place the Incarnation agent’s location. “Let’s see how willing you are to kill children for your cause.” 

All three of the youths on the catwalk leveled their weapons, and Tal thought he saw tiny lights flash along the sides of the leader’s head before three beams of yellow-white light cut through the dusty air and began sweeping toward him. He leapt back, ducking behind the stack of crates a few meters behind his sprawled deputy, as the beams bit into his cover and set the opposite side alight. 

Tal switched his pistol – a compact railgun – to a high-frequency, low-accuracy firing mode, then waited for the sizzling beams to cut out. Handheld beams, he knew, could not maintain continuous power without massive power drain. 

Sure enough, after a few seconds the beams cut out. Tal popped up from behind cover and loosed a whole magazine in the direction of the catwalk – the rattling, bucking weapon discharged a hundred twenty slugs in less than three seconds.  

With ferroceramic shattering into glowing shrapnel-dust all around them, the trio dove for cover, one of them, disoriented, dove off the catwalk completely, landing headfirst with a sickening crunch on the floor below. The other two, flattening themselves behind empty packing material that offered dubious resistance to rail-slugs, peeked out to set fire to other elements of Tal’s surroundings the moment his magazine clicked on empty. 

Tal reloaded, knowing he needed to keep their attention so Yejide, if she was still alive after whatever Horus had done to her, would not become a target of opportunity. Switching to a more accurate fire mode, he peeked out to launch individual shots at his assailants, hoping the rattle of railgun fire and the flash of beams would alert his compatriots. 

He needn’t have worried. The loading-dock door burst inward and the other half-dozen members of his team rushed in. The hapless revolutionaries fired on the newcomers, but they didn’t have a chance against rail-carbines in well-trained hands – both were fatally riddled and dripping blood through the catwalk’s grating in seconds. 

Tal stood slowly, gun pointed to the floor, and signalled them to help him with the downed Yejide. “Horus was here and Blum is down. Call in a medevac.” As soon as he was certain he was not about to be shot by accident, he rushed to her side, quickly verifying that his deputy was breathing, if only shallowly, and that she was not marked by bloodstains or burns. 

Two of the other agents hurried to help Tal move Yejide, while the other two hurried to check the bodies of the three Ladeonist sympathizers. He didn’t relish the duty of calling each one’s family, but there was a perverse, acrid satisfaction in the fact that nobody would be screeching for their release back onto the streets. 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: Diadem of the Damned

2948-04-28 - Tales from the Inbox: Diadem of the Damned

In last week's episode (Tales from the Inbox: The Discarded Diadem), Risko Brett thought he had defeated a half-baked fraud scheme targeting his antique shop on Maribel. A young spacer, failing to sell Brett a crown marked with Xenarch symbols, tossed the item and ran. 

While there is no proof the item was in fact a Xenarch relic (indeed, it seems unlikely), it was definitely something more than a fabricator bauble - Brett learned that rather quickly.

Risko Brett woke just before his usual alarm and sat up in bed to find that his head felt unusually heavy. Reaching up to rub his forehead, he found cool, fluted metal before his hand touched skin.  

Suddenly wide awake, Risko sat bolt upright in bed and pulled the offending object off. It was the crown from the previous day, looking if anything more lustrous in the morning light than it had the previous afternoon. He couldn’t remember getting up in the night to fetch it, and was certain it had been on the shelf when he’d retired. Not having experienced any sort of somnambular episode before, he hurriedly scoured his apartment for any other sign that he had been up and about while unconscious, finding only that a few other items had been dislodged from the shelf by the door.  

Uneasily, Risko hurried through his morning routine, placing the crown back on the shelf as he left for the day. Opening the shop and drinking the fresh-brewed real coffee delivered to him by a specialty café down the street soothed his rattled nerves, and he forgot the incident long before the first customer of the day wandered in.  

“Good morning, Mr. Brett.” Cheery old Mrs. Boelens, a regular browser and occasional buyer, waved to him with a good-natured wink. “Aren’t you looking fancy today.”  

Risko looked down at his clothes and realized that his smart-clothes were configured in a far more formal cut than he usually preferred. He didn’t remember changing the settings, but the new configuration seemed to suit his frame. “I suppose I am.” He shrugged. “Looking for anything specific this morning?”  

“Just browsing, dear.” The woman ambled between the display cases. “Did that collection of Heracles pearls you mentioned finally come in?”  

“Yes, they have!” Risko brightened – Mrs. Boelens had bought exotic pearls before and would likely purchase something from the lot he’d just received. “I haven’t had a chance to put them in the displays. Would you like me to bring them out?”  

She nodded eagerly, so Risko hurried into the back room to find a display tray and lay the various brooches, necklaces, and bracelets out.  

When he returned, Mrs. Boelens quickly set to picking each item up and turning it over in her hands. It took her only a few minutes to select one necklace – a modest sale, but a good way to start the day. As he put the transaction through on the shop’s computer terminal, she kept glancing up at him, smiling slyly, as if sharing a private joke – a joke Risko didn’t get.  

“Mrs. Boelens, may I ask what you think is so funny?” As he asked, Risko placed the necklace in a padded package and handed it to her, the credit transaction complete.  

“Oh, nothing dear.” She tapped her temple with one finger. “I just like to see that you know how to have a little bit of fun once in a while, that’s all.”  

“Fun?” Risko frowned as she turned away. He prided himself on his professionalism and patience – he wasn’t in business for fun. Remembering her gesture, he reached up to his temple, only to find smooth, worked metal there.  

Yanking the crown off his head in alarm, Risko mentally backtracked through his morning. He’d left the crown on the shelf in his flat, and he hadn’t had it on when he’d opened the shop – his reflection in the window-glass would have given it away. He hadn’t had time to go home to get it – nor any desire to do so. Shuddering, he darted into the back room and tossed the crown into an empty inventory bin. 

When a small group of customers wandered in almost an hour later, Risko had calmed down once more, though he had begun habitually running his hand through his hair to verify that he had not been mysteriously crowned once again. The four young people were dressed well, but their attitude told him right away that they weren’t going to buy anything. Still, they asked questions about several items, and Risko was only too happy to answer them, if only to take his mind off other things.  

Just as the group was leaving, Risko had an idea. Retrieving the crown from the stockroom, he set it in an empty space in one of the display cabinets. He gave the digital label a low price – lower than anything else on display - and the non-specific text “REPLICA CROWN.” If someone bought the item, it would become their problem, and he’d still make a profit.  

Indeed, the next customer to come in, a middle-aged man with the erect bearing of a mid-level Navy officer, pointed to the crown. “Is this price right? Seems a bit low.”  

Risko made a show of coming out from behind the counter to scrutinize the label. “That’s my asking price. It’s a real eye-catcher, but there’s not much to say about it.”  

To Risko’s dismay, the officer shrugged and moved on to the next display. When he tried to haggle down the price of a hundred-year-old model of a Terran Sphere-era warship, Risko tried to throw in the crown in order to strike a deal close to his asking price. Once again, the man lost interest, and Risko lost the sale.  

At the end of the day, having sold nothing since the pearl necklace that morning, Risko closed up Brett’s Antiques and went home, checking his head and person several times on the way to make sure the crown had stayed in the shop. Assured that he’d arrived home without it, he tried to relax with holo-dramas and news, only partially succeeding.  

The next morning, Risko woke sprawled on the recliner in front of the idle holo-display in his flat, having not even changed out of the clothes which he had worn to work the previous day. Groggily, he stood and stretched, feeling like the whole episode with the counterfeit Xenarch crown had been nothing but a bad dream.  

A glance in the mirror disabused him of that notion quickly. On his head, gleaming still as if it was new, the silver-white crown sat comfortably over his temples, so familiar there that he did not feel its weight.  

Tearing it off his head, Risko dashed out onto the street and looked around. He needed to be rid of the crown. The young spacer had tossed it to him and he’d caught it willingly – was it really that easy to be rid of it?  

He spotted his mark immediately. The shabbily dressed girl was likely no older than thirteen, and she carried a shoulder-bag covered in glittering material like that of a holo-drama ball gown. Risko crossed the street to head her off, then held the crown out at arm’s length, broadening his salesman’s smile. “Hey kiddo. I’m cleaning house. Want a crown?”  

The girl frowned in confusion, then nodded and motioned for Risko to toss the item in her direction. When he did, she turned it over in her hands, smiled, nodded in thanks, then dropped it onto her head and continued on her way.  

Relieved and guilty in equal measure, Risko Brett retreated into his flat, deciding it was time to take a rare day off from the antiques business.  

Details

Tales from the Inbox: The Discarded Diadem

2948-04-21 - Tales from the Inbox: The Discarded Diadem

 

“Welcome to Brett’s Antiques.” Though he had been thirty seconds from locking the doors and going home for the day, Risko Brett turned on the charm the moment the door chime announced the entrance of a lone customer. 

“Yes, hello.” The newcomer, a young man whose street clothes in the local style failed to disguise a Navy spacer on shore leave, glanced around at the half-lit storefront. One hand clutched a wrapped bundle to his chest while the other absently raked his close-cropped hair. “Are you closing?” 

Risko shrugged, reaching under the counter to turn the display-case lights back on. “I was about to.” It had been a quiet day – the young spacer was only his fifth patron in ten hours, and only three had bought anything. He could tell immediately that this junior enlisted spacer would not be making any major purchases, but it would be bad salesmanship to rush him. “Take your time, look around.”  

“Actually...” The young man stepped further into the shop. “I was wondering if you buy.” 

Risko nodded. Brett’s Antiques was only too happy to buy items from walk-ins, but he doubted the young man could possibly have anything worth his time. “Depends on what you have.”  

Hesitantly, the spacer approached the counter and set his paper-wrapped bundle down carefully, then stepped back as if worried it might explode.  

Risko eyed his customer for a few seconds before touching the bundle, but he didn’t see any indication that he was being subjected to some sort of practical joke. Gingerly, he unfolded the crumpled paper, taking it slow even after he caught his first glimpse of silvery metal within. “Can you tell me what it is?” 

“Well...” The young man looked over his shoulder, then stepped in close and lowered his voice. “My cousin dug it up on Adimari Valis. He sent it to me a few weeks before Nate took the place.”  

Wincing, Risko picked up the item. He didn’t like dealing in Xenarch artifacts, since they tended to attract the wrong kind of customers. Despite his apprehensions, the item didn’t look ancient enough to have been buried in Adimari dirt for five thousand years - its bright, untarnished metal looked new, and it was clearly shaped like it was meant for a human to wear. “It looks like a crown.”  

Nodding eagerly, the young man reached out to point at a line of symbols just below the peaked crest at the front. “That’s Xenarch script, there.”  

Risko scrutinized the text. He couldn’t tell if the symbols were a forgery – perhaps no-one could, since not even the experts could read the extinct aliens’ writing. “It could be. I’d need to have a xenoarchaeologist look at it.”  

“I, uh...” The young man clearly didn’t want Risko to know what he’d already guessed. He’d not given his name; he wanted the transaction to be anonymous. The antiques dealer wondered if the story about a cousin on Adimari Valis was a sham – perhaps the young spacer had stolen the crown or won it in one of Maribel’s disreputable gambling-houses, his presence in which would violate Navy regulations. “I was hoping to sell it today.”  

“Sorry, kid.” Risko pushed the crown back across the counter. “I can’t buy what I can’t verify. It might be what you say it is, but it looks like a-”  

“A damned holo-drama prop, I know.” The youth ran his fingers over the fluted decorations on the face of the artifact. “I thought so too...”  

Risko waited expectantly, but no words followed. He turned away to begin shutting down the shop, supposing that the conversation was over. When he had done so, he turned back to see that his customer had not moved. “Come on, I’ll see you out.”  

Roused from staring down at the gleaming metal bauble, the young man turned and allowed himself to be led from the store but lingered nearby as Risko turned off his shop’s holo-signs and locked the door. 

“Hey, Mr. Brett, do me a favor.”  

Risko turned around in time to see a silvery-white object flashing through the air in his direction. 

“Catch!” 

 Reflexively, he caught the crown, which had been lobbed in a harmless underhand arc. By the time he looked up to its owner, all he saw of the spacer was his heels disappearing around the corner at the end of the block.  

Chuckling and presuming he’d just inadvertently foiled a half-baked swindle, Risko tucked the flashy item under his arm inside his jacket and walked home to his flat a few blocks away. The crown was pretty – even if it was worthless enough to be discarded as soon as its shifty owner couldn’t get any credits for it, he considered it fair compensation for his wasted time. He wondered which of the many bespoke souvenir-fab shops in the city had manufactured such an attractive piece. 

Setting the item on a shelf just inside his front door, Risko busied himself with a meal and his favorite holo-drama, then turned on a vidcast news service. The war and its many minor disasters dominated the news yet again, and he watched with interest but no real concern. Business would continue as usual, and the conflict did bring plenty of new customers to his store, even if some of them were disreputable.   

When he retired for the night, Risko was still chuckling at the hapless spacer’s panicked flight and the glittering souvenir left behind. He’d met with forgery before, but no attempt nearly so crude. 

With a general lull in the action here on the Frontier since the final withdrawal from Matusalemme, and Saint-Lô scheduled to be away from HyperCast relays for a few weeks on a routine post-refit shakedown patrol, I asked for and received permission to post items from the (increasingly lengthy) backlog of interesting stories sent in by the audience which have very little or nothing to do with the war effort.

The story I chose to pull from this fertile mass of potential with approval of the rest of the team here on Saint-Lô is that of Risko Brett, a small-time antiques and curio dealer on Maribel. Mr. Brett had a run-in with a Navy crewman who he thought at first had tried to swindle him. As he would learn (and this audience will discover next week), it wasn't the Brett or a petty-crime arrest that the spacer was fleeing.

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